Commenting on the current conflict around Afrikaans-only schools in the Gauteng Province, Dr. Dan Roodt, leader of PRAAG, has called for seeing it in its historical context.

“Issues around culture, language, identity and education go to the heart of the South African problem,” Roodt said. “Throughout the nineteenth century, Britain tried to suppress Dutch and/or Afrikaans. It was only in the Boer republics and especially in the Transvaal that Afrikaners first attained the right to their own language and culture. This was followed by the genocidal war waged by Britain against Afrikaner women and children in 1900, which included Milner’s attempt at anglicising Afrikaner children in the concentration camps, to turn them into ‘Englishmen of the future’. After 1910 and especially after 1925 Afrikaans enjoyed official recognition and one saw the flowering of Afrikaans schools and universities.”

PRAAG is highly concerned about the current conditions of “near-genocidal levels of violence directed against Afrikaner farmers, but also against the Afrikaner minority in cities”. The organisation directs attention to the underlying Marxist, centralist and violent culture of the ANC and the South African Communist Party that currently rule South Africa.

“We all know that Marxism during the twentieth century was mostly synonymous with genocide, in dozens of countries. Not only does the ANC and its Communist partner not lift a finger to protect people from vicious physical attacks by members of the majority, but it has evidently set out to extirpate the Afrikaans language and culture completely by threatening to close down or fundamentally alter Afrikaans schools. Those schools represent the last vestiges of Afrikaner community life and islands of Afrikaans within an ambient anglocentric, violent and intolerant majority culture. The attack on them by Panayza Lesufi and the Gauteng Department of Education is tantamount to linguistic genocide,” said Roodt.

PRAAG has already collected more than 4 000 signatures in an online petition opposing the anglicisation of Afrikaans schools and is aiming for at least 10 000 signatures.

“The Schools Act does not provide enough protection for Afrikaans schools and the Constitution was so badly negotiated by the moronic NP traitors that the sections dealing with language are contradictory, if not nonsensical. We must look to the Constitution of the ZAR, as well as Act no. 10 of 1888, the South Africa Act of 1909 and International Law for a basis to argue in favour of Afrikaans-only, autonomous community schools that must not be subjected to any form of linguistic or majority-demographic pressure. On the contrary, the state should provide far more resources for the preservation and development of Afrikaans, as a minority culture under threat from the privileged majority culture, as well as two centuries of colonialist and Marxist genocide,” Roodt said.